


Certainties in Isolation

by Quercusrobur



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Imprisonment, Loneliness, Pre-Episode: Revolution of the Daleks, The Doctor (Doctor Who) Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 06:01:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28466484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quercusrobur/pseuds/Quercusrobur
Summary: The Doctor is alone.But then the Doctor has often been alone. Something seems different this time.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20





	Certainties in Isolation

**Author's Note:**

> _Just a bit of character study, sliding in just before the deadline. This is based only on the promo material for Revolution of the Daleks, of course, and may turn out to be irrelevant tomorrow. Or not! Beta read by the lovely OneOfThoseThings._
> 
> _Happy New Year!_

The Doctor is alone. 

She sleeps alone, and she wakes alone; she eats alone, and she waits alone. When she speaks, no one answers; when she rages, no one comes. When she begins to deface the walls of her cage, looking for the seams, or the source of the light, or the mechanics of the door, no one attempts to stop her; and after she has worn her hands bloody she wakes with her injuries repaired, alone. She watches the stars tumble by outside her window alone. She laughs alone, and she cries alone, and when she walks, she walks alone.

In all the Doctor's long life, the thing she has been most is alone.

But not like this.

When the Time Lords had needed to contain the uncontainable, they had frozen it in cryogenic stasis in a hidden prison behind a quantum wall in a bubble universe timelocked away from all tampering. By contrast, it seems almost cruel to leave the Doctor awake, to live through each distorted moment in this place of disjointed time. The bars and walls of her cage are laced through with dwarf star alloy, which disrupts even her sense of her own personal time and feels like being smothered by a wet blanket if she touches it. The whole place is muffled in some sort of temporal displacement field which renders all her perceptions unclear. Deprived of every anchor, she gets lost in the eddies and reflections, flinching sometimes at the strange mirages.

Everything feels bent back on itself, like she is living the same day over and over and over again. The Doctor has taken to scratching marks in the walls no one cares that she defaces with a bit of gravel she keeps wearing away and having to replace, just for proof that time passes here, too, just to have something that _changes_.

Sometimes she looks at the accumulating marks and wishes she were not doing that.

When she leaves her cell she only ever has one path available to her, through a series of locks that suggest she's being kept in an enormous three-dimensional rat maze. Neither natural world nor ship, her prison is some combination of the two; the gravity has that odd flatness of the artificially derived, but the constant hum is too faint and distributed to be the vibration of engines. Instead she suspects the place began life as an asteroid, and has been hollowed out and built upon to hold the troubled flotsam of the universe, those outside any proper jurisdiction but who must be kept apart. 

The Doctor is not pleased with her inclusion on that list. _She_ isn't the one who burned -

-

The loneliness snaps down over her like monstrous jaws sometimes, crushing and suffocating. She wrestles it away. She takes a breath. She makes a mark on the wall. There is nothing else she can touch, nothing she can influence, no one she can speak to. Nothing she can do about it but wait.

The place was built to hold the creature that escaped the Pandorica, and hold her it does.

If there is anything the Doctor knows about, it is being alone. She knows the loneliness of the renegade, partly self-inflicted and never absolute. She knows the loneliness of the friendless, when even those few one thought to trust turn away. She knows the loneliness of the bereaved, facing time suddenly drained of meaning. 

She knows the loneliness of the homeless.

She knows the loneliness of the survivor.

She knows the loneliness of hope extinguished.

The Doctor watches the stars tumble by outside her window, and does not let her hope be extinguished.

She is alone, but when she walks, she hears the echoes of other footsteps, feels the ghosts of other hands in hers. Those restless presences of other selves shift in her mind, a half-step to the side of her narrative of _self_ , each with their own favourite memories of companionship. When she laughs, she laughs with friends; when she cries, she remembers the acceptance that lets her do so.

She is alone, and maybe homeless - maybe profoundly homeless. Maybe more homeless than she had ever guessed. But she is not friendless.

She doesn't know what will happen, when it will happen, how it will happen; she doesn't know if she is findable, or whom she might expect to be able to do so. She isn’t sure she knows how long she has been imprisoned. But she knows that time passes, and she knows that she is alive, and she knows that people are waiting for her.

She has that resolute hope born of a long, long life, that certainty that tomorrow will come and the only condition necessary for it to be better is to be alive.

And she is never truly alone.


End file.
